Omarosa Manigault Newman has said enough in the past few days to talk about for an entire week, but I don't want to do that. Instead, I want to focus on very specific things that relate to other topics we've already discussed at length.
That brings us to Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico.
Trump is ultimately responsible for what happens under his watch, and that's especially true when he makes a point of taking credit for the response (even if it was a terrible response), but that doesn't mean others in his regime can't share responsibility.
In her new book, Omarosa claims that John Kelly was partially responsible for delaying the response to Hurricane Maria. According to her, John Kelly believed Puerto Rican officials were exaggerating the severity of storm damage to take advantage of taxpayers.
Manigault Newman described the administration's response to Puerto Rico — after the hurricane took out its electrical grid, left residents without food, water or housing and killed many — as lethargic and contrasted it with the White House's aid to Florida and Texas when those states were hit by hurricanes Irma and Harvey.
In a meeting, Kelly blamed the crisis on Puerto Rico's "already screwed-up" infrastructure, she wrote in "Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House," which was released Tuesday. Kelly suggested that Puerto Rico's government, near bankruptcy, "was trying to exploit the hurricane to focus on the United States to foot the bill to rebuild their electrical grid," she continued.
It's difficult to judge these claims because John Kelly is the one who fired her and she clearly has an axe to grind.
That doesn't necessarily mean she's lying, however, and all of her claims about the White House and Trump himself are entirely plausible. She has also released audio recordings that corroborate some of her biggest claims.
Based on what we know for sure, I find it believable that John Kelly was instrumental in delaying the response to Hurricane Maria and may even be obstructing it to this day. Before he became Trump's chief of staff, Kelly served as the chief of Homeland Security where he presided over the earliest attempts to implement Trump's Muslim Ban. Since that time, Kelly has disgraced himself on numerous occasions and proven himself to be a misogynist by defending Trump's former staff secretary Rob Porter even after photographic evidence of Porter's domestic abuse emerged.
It's also true that the Trump regime's response to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in Texas and Florida respectively was remarkably different. We didn't need Omarosa to tell us that.